Beware: Clone Wars Is Actually Really Fun

I imagine that this will be an outlying and unpopular opinion given some of the other reaction of The Clone Wars, but I’m just going to be honest and say that I thoroughly enjoyed it.  Not in some type of apologist or guilty fashion, but I really considered it to be well worth the time and money.  Of course, you simply can’t go in and expect something of the caliber and emotional weight as Empire.  But by simply accepting the fact that this film is purposefully light on story and high on serialized pulp, you too can go in and eventually finding yourself admitting that Clone Wars is actually a heck of a lot of fun.

Given that the Rotten Tomatoe meter is hovering around 20%, I should probably clarify exactly why I feel that way.  In comparison, when I was a younger kid I watched a lot of superhero cartoons on Saturday mornings and read a lot of Marvel comics.  There were deep storylines to be had, charecters well developed, and tons of references sprinkled about that rewarded the loyal.  However, I didn’t care about that.  I just wanted to see the X-Men or Iron Man fight somebody.  And I wanted it to look really awesome.  Everything else was just filler.  Putting yourself into that paticular frame of mind, as immature and juvenile as it may be to you, will help you realize that Clone Wars does a very good job at what it sets out to be.  I realized this as soon as the movie was over at my screening.  My paticular theater was full of a lot of younger boys, most of whom were around five to ten years old.  When they were getting up to leave, most of them were shouting things like “wow”, or “awesome”.  And really, that’s all the review that this film should be getting, because their opinions are realistically the only ones that matter in this context.

That’s not to say that Clone Wars is specifically for those five to ten year old boys.  My wife (who I’ve turned into a casual fan) has mentioned to me numerous times since we saw it together that she really liked it.  And I can tell when she’s only trying to humor me, this wasn’t one of those times.  And to be honest, this loyal fan of more than twenty years who continually cites Empire Strikes Back as the greatest film crafted by the hand of mortal man loved it as well.  If nothing else, its a fulfilled longtime promise of others besides Lucas being able to play in the sandbox in mediums other than the Wild West of the established Expanded Universe books.  Lots of different things are attempted in this new non-George pursuit.  Some of these fall short, but most provide a refreshing way to look at what otherwise could be contextuallized in a ‘been there, done that’ sort of way.

It’s more than excusable if you’d like to wait until you can watch basically the same thing for free on a weekly basis in just a months time.  But if you’ve only been looking forward to that with a “meh” attitude, be forewarned.  You may find yourself wishing you’d given yourself the treat of seeing the refreshing next generation of Star Wars in a theater environment when you had the chance.

Ch-Ch-Ch-Changes

Hey, gang.  I’ve felt like mixing things up a bit and I’m trying to encourage myself to write a bit more.  To that end, I’m going to repurpose this ol’ blog of mine.  I still want to look deeper into tech topics and such, but I also want to post more fun and perhaps personal stuff on here as well.  Although I dug what Vox had to offer, I’m not going to post to it anymore in the hopes of doing more here.

Also!  It may take some time to take effect, but you can now reach this site by hitting up danielhorton.net.  Thanks, and stick around!

LAN Party 2008

I usually don’t mix work with this blog, but I am just tickled pink with how this turned out.

Plus, I’d really welcome any critiques.  I’m not done yet, and our whole advertising will be themed from this poster.  So nit pick away!

A Re-Introduction To Twitter

I’ve held off judgement to Twitter for some time now, because it seems to be a service that is constantly evolving.  Not from a technical point of view, but concerning what the community is actually doing with it.  Before I go on, I should say that I still think it is a service of immeasurable use and service.  However, that’s really all up to what the majority of the users are doing with it.  Sharing applicable information makes it something that I can’t do without, but the way that it has been utilized by many over the past month or so has made me reconsider how applicable it really is to me.

A few nights ago, I somewhat hazily sent out a tweet that said I was becoming quickly jaded with the service.  That’s mostly because I’m tiring of the useless tweets that many I’m following are sending out.  I think that perhaps many don’t realize that many of their followers are made up of those who aren’t close friends of theirs.  Subsequently, they likely don’t care what they had to eat for lunch and even less for the rest of their daily schedule.  I really can’t understand why many feel that can be worthwhile information for most of their followers.  This is my only real gripe, however the frequency of these types of tweets have increased dramatically as of late.  Causing me to care less and less for checking the latest tweets from those I follow.  And it’s kinda disappointing that I have to dig through the trash in order to find potential useful information.

On a side note, my dissatisfaction with the state of the service really showed itself last week when I fictionalized a zombie attack on the UAH campus in real time.  I thought that if we were really telling everyone about the little and overwhelmingly mundane details of our life, we could at least ramp it up a bit and make it actually compelling.

That said, I hope many might be willing to re-introduce themselves to Twitter.  It’s time to realize that with its current functionality that Twitter isn’t simply a friend-to-friend platform like MySpace or Facebook.  Telling everyone what you’ve been doing lately may be interesting when you can fully elaborate on a blog, especially when its directed towards those who may know you outside of it.  But within the confines of 140 characters, it ain’t happening.  Updates detailing trips or similarly unique status updates are always welcome.  But most times, I really wouldn’t care to know that you’re eating a hot dog.  What does that do for me or your other followers?  Instead, before hitting the send button, ask yourselves a few questions.  Is this tweetable?  Is this useful?  Is it new?  Will your followers actually care?  A second thought could really go a long way here.

I really hope that everyone doesn’t interpret this as offensive or insulting.  This is more of a one man intervention, really.  Were Twitter to actually provide some type of categorization of tweets, these mundane updates might actually have a place.  If we had the option of sending certain tweets to only certain lists of friends or followers, it would make a lot more sense.  I won’t name names, but there’s one person that I follow simply because of the retail store that they work at.  I couldn’t care less about their personal tweets, but those detailing their workplace are usually really useful.  If they could categorize these into “work” and “home”, it would solve that problem for me.  But unfortunately, this probably isn’t happening anytime soon.  And until it does, these kind of relatively pointless tweets are really diluting and lessening the service.  I really hope that it doesn’t turn Twitter into just another fad that will be forgotten soon as opposed to a concrete source of information, but exactly that is going to happen unless there are certain steps taken both by the Twitter developers and the Twitter community.

So again, ask yourself.  Is this tweetable?  Is this useful?  Is it new?  Will your followers actually care?

The Connectivity Problem

This past week, my wife Sharla and I took a bite of Apple’s bait and splurged on their special college themed deal of a MacBook and a free iPod Touch.  I obviously adore both new toys, but I had an incident eliciting a dark revelation a few nights ago.

Every night as I’m starting to wind down before getting to sleep as I’m in the bed, I’ll often read a few pages of a book or perhaps play my Nintendo DS for a minute or two.  It’s never a big deal, just a little something to do as I relax before shutting down.  The other night, I brought my new Touch with me and was checking email and Twitter before getting to sleep.  That may not seem particularity problematic initially, but after some thought I mentally slapped myself and vowed not to do it again.  I’ve often been proud of the fact that I don’t own a cell phone.  It’s a continual revolt against connectiveness, mostly because I choose not to be so in a continual fashion.  There are simply many times throughout the day in which I make a conscious decision to not be connected.  In my line of work, it’s easy to allow ones self to be subject to a constant barrage of information.  As I work each day I’m being bombarded with tweets, email, calls, RSS items and so on.  On the way home or while there, I really prefer to be away from all that.  Most times, I’d rather wind down and forget that the outside world exists quite honestly.  It allows me to regather focus and simply relax.  Having a cell phone while doing my evening chilling or running around excludes me from my own “serenity now”.

I sometimes even question whether or not I really want to be that connected during the main part of my day.  All of that stuff mentioned above has never affected my productivity, but it can at times add to stress or general anxiety.  Perhaps I long for the day during high school where I didn’t know of the outside world until getting off the bus.  Then, the only thing that mattered between commutes was what was going on with my friends.  Maybe it isn’t too juvenille or naive to try to attain that again.  I wonder if the constant connectiveness with friends or the works of others via the conduit of technology disenchants us from actual human contact.  I admit it has affected me somewhat as I’ve noticed a correlation between my increased use of technology and my shyness level.  And if you’ve known me personally in the past, you know I’m prone to not be shy at all.

The thing is, I’m quickly realizing that a lot of these things keeping me connected are simply opitional.  It wouldn’t inhibit me in any way if I were to drastically reduce the use of them.  Not that I’ll kill them off completely, but perhaps a mental diet is sometimes just as needed as a physical one.